Things Common Sense Tells Us
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. One can debate about the unreasonable conditions the Democrats exploited to gain an advantage — unconditional early and absentee voting in many states being the most obvious — but it is clear that, pre-established conditions being what they were, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.
To refuse to accept this is simply to defy and deny the presentable facts of the situation in favor of outlandish conspiracy theories and “gut feelings” (i.e., desperately wanting the facts not to be true) — and to willfully ignore the fact that the Trump legal team, on each and every occasion in which it has presented its case in court since November, has carefully avoided presenting any evidence for its rhetorical claims of election fraud, or even daring to claim widespread fraud in front of a judge.
There was no massive election fraud of the sort that would have caused whole states to flip from Trump to Biden, or vice versa. (See above.) Or if there was, the Trump legal team and its millions of citizen true believers have utterly failed to dig up one iota of plausible evidence or firsthand testimony to substantiate that allegation. Hence, for practical purposes — including the purposes of fomenting mass outrage and protest rallies — the issue is a non-starter, a mirage, a fundraising or ego-saving ruse.
The riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was not led by Antifa communists. That there may have been a few such punks on hand to egg on the mob to higher levels of violence I will not deny. (I am not claiming such a thing occurred; I merely have no stake in trying to deny it.) Nevertheless, it seems quite clear that the bulk of the rioters, including those who occupied the chambers and offices of the building, were Trump supporters who had been encouraged to this fever pitch of irrationality by Trump and his mouthpieces and minions, from the “alternative media” and the congress itself, over the preceding days and weeks.
Some of the rioters at the Capitol, known and self-identified Trump supporters, were equipped and motivated to do personal harm to human beings, most especially Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump had been personally criticizing as a coward, and popular Trumpland voices such as Lin Wood openly demanding be executed as a traitor, for days. Had Pence been found and isolated by at least some members of this mob of Trump supporters, it is not at all out of the question, given the nature of crowds, the effects of mass anger, and the fact that many rioters had arrived there with openly violent intentions, that Mike Pence would either have been murdered or taken hostage that day. (Mike Pence, the reader may wish to be reminded, was Donald Trump’s most effective, reasonable, and loyal supporter throughout his entire presidency.)
The Republican Party caused all of this, and deserves every last bit of its bitter reward. So, more importantly, do the millions of Americans who might have been the last bulwark of liberty on this Earth, but who sold their souls cheap to the most transparent hucksters their nation has ever seen, and in the process discredited themselves and their former (i.e., pre-cult) cause forever. Their discredit would not matter, because they, in the final analysis, do not matter. The problem is that their betrayal of themselves and their country will redound to the permanent detriment and endangerment of their betters, namely all those principled, decent people who did not exchange their principles for a tribal red hat, and whose good name and great cause will forever be unjustly but conveniently smeared with the cult’s excrement in the popular progressive ethos — exactly as the Republican establishment, along with America’s external enemies, had hoped and intended.
